Designing systems engineers actually use

A design system is a product with a very specific audience: the people who ship. If it is slower to use than writing a one-off component, it will be ignored, no matter how beautiful the documentation is.

Start from the codebase

We audit what already exists in production before we design a single token. The goal is to name and tidy what engineers already use, then close the gaps — not to replace everything with something new.

Tokens, components and documentation ship together, versioned like any other dependency. When the design changes, the code changes in the same release.